More arrests in Burma

Burma's junta arrested more people under the cover of darkness despite a crescendo of international outrage during a keenly watched UN mission to bring an end to a bloody crackdown on protests.

At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Rangoon, Burma's biggest city and centre of monk-led protests against decades of military rule and deepening economic hardship, witnesses said.

In one house near the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest shrine in devoutly Buddhist Burma and starting point for last week's rallies, only a 13-year-old girl remained. Her parents had been taken in the middle of the night, she said.

There was no word on where the prisoners were being taken or how many they would join. Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the United Nations' human rights envoy for Burma, said the number of those detained was now in the thousands.

The crackdown continued despite faint signs of progress by UN envoy Ibrahim Gambari on his mission to persuade junta chief Than Shwe to relax his iron grip and open talks with detained Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he met twice.

Mr Gambari, a former Nigerian foreign minister, was due to meet Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong before heading back to New York after a four-day stay in Burma, half of it spent waiting to see senior general Than Shwe.

There was no word, however, on whether the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Singapore is the current chairman, was willing to act against Burma, brought into the group a decade ago in hopes of coaxing it into democratic reform.

So far, ASEAN's policy of "constructive engagement" has worked no better than Western sanctions and last week's bloody crackdown in at which at least 10 people died prompted a rare expression of "revulsion" from the 10-member group.